Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Chain Whips, Cassettes, Gears, Cogs and Compasses...

Now that The Slut is here I'm converting my road bike back to a straight "roadie" by removing the aerobars and, possibly, making a few adjustments to stem length etc. over time. I hope to start doing more climbimg and hill work, so I also decided to change the rear cassette to a 12/27. For the uninitiated, the "cassette" is the set of gears on the rear wheel in a derailleur set-up and 12/27 refers to the number of teeth/cogs on the smallest and largest gear within the cassette. By increasing the number of cogs on the biggest gear I will give myself a few extra options when contending with steeper gradients.

I also have my Zipp 808 race wheels currently without a cassette, so the plan was to buy a new 12/27 cassette; put it on the road bike and put the current road bike cassette onto the race wheels.

It was a fun little project that included degreasing/cleaning both the existing cassette and the chain. Here are a few snaps....

SRAM PG 1070 12/27 arrives!

﻿

Ooooh! Shiny!

The exisiting cassette before removal

Inserting the cassette removal tool

Chain whip and grips in opposite directions

It's off!

﻿

Building the 12/12

﻿﻿

Looking good

﻿

On the bike

Cleaning the chain

Cleaning the old cassette

Cleaned-up and ready to reassemble on the 808

Ready to go

Zipp 808 with cassette installed - it looks fast!

﻿﻿

Next step was to try out the new cassette during a killer one hour interval workout on the trainer yesterday - quite the sweatfest! There were a few "clicks" on some of the gears, so will be making a few adjustments before taking it for a full 50 mile test ride on Sunday with The Snitch and a new character in the blog to be revealed soon......... "The Compass"! :-)